Taylor Swift will have to face a jury trial over copyright claims regarding one of her biggest hits, “Shake It Off,” after a judge refused to dismiss the case.
District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald originally rejected copyright claims by the girl group 3LW over accusations that Swift had copied lyrics from their 2001 “Playas Gon’ Play” hit in her 2014 song “Shake It Off,” the BBC reported in a piece published Friday.
Both songs include variations of the lines, “haters gonna hate” and “players gonna play.”
“In the early 2000s, popular culture was adequately suffused with the concepts of players and haters to render the phrases ‘playas… gonna play’ or ‘haters… gonna hate’, standing on their own, no more creative than ‘runners gonna run’; ‘drummers gonna drum’; or ‘swimmers gonna swim,'” the judge said. “The concept of actors acting in accordance with their essential nature is not at all creative; it is banal.”
“In sum, the lyrics at issue… are too brief, unoriginal, and uncreative to warrant protection under the Copyright Act,” he added.
Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler appealed and a federal appeals court reversed the decision. The case was sent back to Fitzgerald who said, despite “persuasive arguments” by Swift’s experts, the case would go to trial.
“Even though there are some noticeable differences between the works, there are also significant similarities in word usage and sequence/structure,” the justice wrote.
“The court cannot presently determine that no reasonable juror could find substantial similarity of lyrical phrasing, word arrangement, or poetic structure between the two works,” he added.
Of course, they are both guilty of ripping off the idea from Stevie Nicks "players only love you when they're playin" in Dreams:
I'd go even further back, to Tom Lehrer's "Pollution" - "Fish gotta swim, and birds gotta fly/But they don't last long if they try..."
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